Many people at Imperial will have heard something about
coaching-a powerful approach to support learning and development which has been
expanding in recent years in both education and health. As part of their drive in
leading excellence in medical education, Dr Arti Maini and Dr Sonia Kumar from
the Undergraduate Primary Care Teaching team have been leading on developing a
coaching culture across the Medical School at Imperial (supported through
Medical School Innovation funding). In addition to her educational role as
Deputy Director for Undergraduate Primary Care Education at Imperial, Arti is
an accredited coach, coach trainer and supervisor and co-author of the book
‘Coaching for Health’. She works as a coach for the Imperial Coaching Academy
and sits on its strategy group.
A large number of educators have been trained in this
coaching approach: the undergraduate primary care teaching team, Imperial’s
academic GP VTS, community GP tutors, personal tutors and the Career Champion
network and research facilitators from the Imperial College Academic Health
Science Centre. All those trained are able to access ongoing coaching
supervision to support their learning. Work is in progress with Imperial’s Ed
Tech team to develop innovative digital learning modules in coaching for
education and health so watch this space!
Arti is now working closely with the EDU offering coaching
courses that are formally accredited by the Royal College of Physicians. The
coaching programme has attracted attention nationally and internationally and
medical schools across the UK and Canada are keen to learn more about our
approach.
Examples
of quotes from faculty include:
"The session felt tailored
and it was good to be able to practice. For me it worked perfectly and exceeded
my expectations.”
“The most surprising thing
about the course was how transformative it was”.
“This has radically changed
my view of the power of language and I don’t think I appreciated it until doing
this course”
“I can see multiple
scenarios for the coachee-centred approach to coaching/teaching/training”
“The course has reinforced
my understanding of how beneficial a tool this can be and developed my skills
significantly”
In parallel to training medical educators, Arti has also
been busy training medical students in Year 3 and Year 5 in health coaching
skills (supported through funding from HENWL). Evaluation so far has been very
positive demonstrating positive impact for patients and for the students
themselves. Arti has been working with the Head of Academic Support for the
Early Years to explore how coaching may best be used to maximise the
successfulness of learning approaches.
Examples of quotes from students are:
“I think patients…
feel quite empowered. They're sort of very motivated about what to do next and
it's nice to see that you've sort of left them with that sense that they can
change what they want”.
“I think it makes
the medical student more valuable to, you know, the hospital or the GP”.
“It’s just generally my motivation
seems to be increased”
“I guess if you have an issue it makes
it easier to deal with because you now have like a structure of exactly...you
know the exact structure of how to solve your own problems essentially”.
“I've noticed quite significant transformation in the way I interact with
people. I'm much more receptive and I think I listen more. I find... Well we
are listening in conversation but I find a lot of the time we aren't listening.
So the quality of listening has gone up…it just makes the conversation a lot
better.”
Going forward, the Undergraduate Primary Care team are
developing health coaching to incorporate a socially accountable ethos,
building in ‘service learning’ approaches across its courses. Students in Year
3 and Year 5 who have trained in health coaching skills have started working
with patients from diverse local communities, holding empowering conversations
to support them with their issues around health and lifestyle.
We look forward to develop our health coaching courses
further over the coming year as we continue to work with our department’s Self
Care Academic Research Unit (SCARU), Imperial’s community engagement team at
the new White City campus, with White City Enterprise and the Dalgarno Trust in
North Kensington and Dr Paquita de Zulueta who leads the Grenfell Clinical
Outreach Team.
We will be offering a new Special Choice Placement on Health
Promotion in 2018-19 where students from Year 5 will have the opportunity to
learn health coaching skills and put them into practice in making a real
meaningful difference to local communities.
We are currently evaluating the student health coaching
training through questionnaires and focus groups and interim findings suggest a
positive impact on patients, host GP practices and on the students themselves.
Over the coming year we will be looking at how to increase patient involvement
in health coaching course evaluation and research.
If you would like to find out more about the
coaching-related work being carried out by our department, please contact Arti
on a.maini@imperial.ac.uk or Sonia on Sonia.kumar@imperial.ac.uk
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